How Email Enslaves Us

NOREENA HERTZ: The enslaving email culture is becoming increasingly problematic. High-skilled knowledge workers now spend 28% of their time at work dealing with email. Employees speak of being fearful opening emails and feeling increasingly helpless in the face of the deluge. Physiologically we now know that the state of continuous disruption puts us into a constant state of hormone-induced stress.

Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it’s skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
It is also vacuuming up our thinking time. How many minutes have you been able to carve out today just to think? And yet, in an increasingly complex world thinking time is ever more critical and valuable.

Some companies are trying to deal with this problem in innovative ways – actively discouraging unnecessary ccs, dedicating particular times of the week as email-free zones, banning email exchanges between staff sitting on the same floor.

I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiqués. I try too, to give others more slack. The respond-now culture is a two-way street. I’m trying to be more mindful of that.